Background: Thyroid disorders are common throughout the world including in India. Rapid and accurate intraoperative diagnosis of thyroid lesions helps in deciding the plan of management and spares the patient the additional expenses and morbidity of a second surgery. Aim of the study: To assess the role of imprint cytology in diagnosis of thyroid lesions in consecutive thyroidectomy specimens at Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute, Pondicherry. Materials and Methods: Study design: Cross sectional study Place of study: Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute, Pondicherry. Study period- November 2015 to July 2017. 60 consecutive thyroidectomy specimens were subjected to touch imprint cytology by the same pathologist who was blinded of the prior fine needle aspiration cytology reports and the results of imprint cytology and fine needle aspiration cytology were compared with the final histopathological examination report. The data obtained were entered in MS Excel sheet and analysed. Results: A total of 60 consecutive thyroid specimens from the departments of General Surgery and ENT were studied. Thyroid lesions showed a female preponderance (female: male ratio of 13:1) with maximum incidence in the fourth decade of life. Colloid goitre was the most common benign lesion and papillary carcinoma was the most common malignancy accounting for 43.3 and 18.3 % of the study population. Imprint cytology had a sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and accuracy of 61.5%, 97.9%, 88.8%, 90.1% and 90% respectively which was found to be better compared to fine needle aspiration cytology. Conclusion: Imprint cytology is a simple, cheap and reliable intraoperative diagnostic technique for thyroid lesions. It has high specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and accuracy. Though other intraoperative diagnostic methods like frozen section remain an option, the lack of uniform availability and expense remains a limiting factor. The diagnostic indices of imprint cytology were found to be comparable to that of frozen section in various other studies.